22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [42]
She is helping Aurek into his pullover when somebody knocks at the door.
‘If that’s my dad,’ says Peter, ‘he’s going to kill me.’
‘Nobody will kill you,’ says Silvana. ‘I will talk to him. Tell him you boys made a mistake.’
She stands in the hallway, the shape of a man darkening the coloured glass pane in the door. She ties her headscarf tight and opens the door, preparing words in her head. She will explain that the boys meant no harm.
‘Good afternoon,’ the man says, lifting his hat. ‘I am Peter’s father. Mr Benetoni.’
Silvana forgets her words. Something in the man’s smile makes her forget to speak. Everything about him, from his polished shoes to his trilby hat and even his thick head of hair, shines like something brand new. If the price labels were still attached to his clothes she wouldn’t be surprised at all.
She realizes she is staring like an idiot and looks quickly at the ground, as if she has dropped something. His shoes are brown leather lace-ups. Elegant shoes. They must be handmade. Her eyes take in the turn-ups of his sharply creased trousers. The man is the newest-looking thing she’s seen in years.
‘I’m Peter’s father,’ he says, extending his hand to her.
They shake hands and still she doesn’t look up because she’s blushing now. His hand is wide and fleshy and he encloses her own small fingers gently, the way you would hold a small bird.
‘He is here, isn’t he, Peter?’
‘Yes,’ she says, trying to pull herself together. ‘Yes, he is here.’
She invites him inside and he fills the hallway. He looks well fed like his son, a double chin framing a large-nosed face and bright, concerned eyes. He has dark curls that glisten with hair oil. This is not a peasant farmer. Not at all. Silvana looks at his broad chest and imagines him as an opera singer.
‘I’m very sorry, Mr Benetoni,’ she says. ‘Please do not be angry with the boys. Aurek is very sorry.’
‘Call me Tony,’ he says. He speaks slowly, his voice careful and steady. ‘I’m not angry. What does a day missed from school matter? Peter is often in trouble at school. He hasn’t had an easy life.’
And then he launches into his own story, which is not at all new. They stand in the hall with the door half open, and Silvana has not even asked him if he would like to take his coat off, and he is telling her about his wife who died.
‘I lost her just after Peter was born,’ he says, holding his hands out, splaying his thick fingers as if sand is spilling through them.
Silvana would like to stop him talking. She doesn’t need his sad stories. She has enough of her own, and anyway, the world is full of sad stories. But this man carries on as if he has come to the house explicitly to tell her, and she is drawn in by him. She can feel her head tipping to one side as she listens.
He is a foreigner too. Italian parents who came to Suffolk and worked in the cider orchards. He was born and brought up in England, and lost his mother when he was just a child. When he was old enough to leave school, his father moved to Kent but Tony stayed in Suffolk and married a local landowner’s daughter. Her parents were furious. She had married down.
‘Down?’ Silvana is not sure what this means.
‘Down. She was upper-class. They thought I wasn’t good enough for her. Once we had Peter, they changed their minds. They’ve been very good to me. And then, after the birth of Peter, my wife became ill and died.’
He tells her how, when Italy entered the war, he was interned, separated from his parents-in-law and his son and sent to prison, despite all the influence his father-in-law wielded in town.
‘Local politics,’ he said. ‘A lot of people profited from the war, and my father-in-law was on the wrong side of certain people at that time. He got me out eventually, but it took some time.’
Silvana struggles to keep up with his story; it is long and winding and involves different places – the Isle of Wight, a prison in Kent, other